I've come across many examples over the years where a data set is "open" to the public and editable, then becomes locked down, or potentially sold to a large corporation. A good example of this in the past was IGDB being sold to Twitch, or GoodReads being sold to Amazon. I feel like a lot of great potential open source applications are just missing the option to hook into data, like health data, product meta data, etc.

Looking at what options are out there, I am struggling to piece together what alternatives there are besides one person/entity owning the data on a server. I thought maybe the Fediverse was an option with how BookWyrm is handling their process, but I'm not too sure if that's doable for anything outside of content with the data being in one place versus another.

Another weird idea that came to my mind was treating it almost like how NetlifyCMS handles it with the data being pushed back to a centralized Git repo and the data being accessible there. Sounds like a super weird file database setup (or would have to change each DB change to be a migration), but a possibility.

What are your thoughts on this? How can data be better handled and still accessible to the general public?